Past Films

Summer Wars @ The Japanese Fall Festival

Director: Mamoru Hosoda

Genre(s): Adventure, Sci-Fi, Comedy, Animation

Rating: NR

Running Time: 114 min.

NOT AT THE MOXIE. IT WILL SCREEN FRIDAY, SEPT.6 DURING THE 18th ANNUAL JAPANESE FALL FESTIVAL

The Japanese Fall Festival will be in the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden at Nathanael Greene / Close Memorial Park
2400 S. Scenic. Adults: $7 Children 12 and under: $3 Weekend Pass: $10 for adults, $5 for children
More info here:

SUMMARY: When teenage math prodigy Kenji solves a 2,056 digit math riddle sent to his cell phone, he unwittingly breaches the security barricade protecting Oz, a globe-spanning virtual world where millions of people and governments interact through their avatars, handling everything from online shopping and traffic control, to nuclear launch codes. Now a malicious AI program called Love Machine is hijacking Oz accounts, growing exponentially more powerful and sowing chaos and destruction in its wake. SUMMER WARS is a visual tour-de-force, with the amazing world of Oz as the highlight. Like the Internet as conceived by pop artist Haruki Murakami, Oz is a hallucinatory pixel parade of cool avatar designs, kung fu jackrabbits, toothy bears, and a bursting rainbow of colors. (GKIDS)

"Hosoda, who directed the cult film "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," has made a sophisticated yet poignant family entertainment with an appeal beyond Japanese animation buffs."

- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

"Summer Wars surprisingly celebrates togetherness and bravery as much as binary-mathematics expertise, all helped along by a kick-ass synthesis of traditional hand-drawn scenes and fluid, rainbow-explosive CG artistry."

- Nick Schager, Time Out New York

"Summer Wars is a magnificently manufactured piece of film entertainment that goes beyond the obvious and manages to comment, often obliquely, on everything from Facebook to virtual war and/or terrorism without ever seeming heavy-handed or strident."